We were made to understand that the position canvassed by Alhaji Dauda Birma on behalf on the northern elders recently does not tally with you have on ground. What is the true position of things?
Alhaji Dauda Birma was reported to have together, perhaps with some other people visited the office of the national chairman of the Peoples Democratic party (PDP), Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, and from what I read in the papers, the purpose of the visit was first to convey to Mr. President through the chairman of the party the appreciation of people, I don’t know which people he was referring to but I suppose the people who were happy to have Al-Mustapha a released from prison. But the point he made there is that the release of Al-Mustapha was as a result of the sole effort of Mr. President. Well, if it is true, I also want to support that because many people including most of us were happy to see Al-Mustapha out of prison after his incarceration for 15 years.
I also want to join others in commending Mr. President for doing that job, but if that statement was made as a political gimmick then it is rather unfortunate. Everyone is aware there are so many people both in the open and behind the scene who have been in prayer and also doing whatever it takes to ensure that justice was done to Al-Mustapha, so I thought rather than giving credit to only one source of this effort, one would have preferred that all those who were in prayer and making efforts in their own ways to see the release of Almustapha, deserve our appreciation and commendation. The other aspect of Alhaji Dauda Birma’s visit has to do with the pledge he made, I understand it was on behalf of the northern elders.
There have been enquiries about whether he was speaking on behalf of Arewa consultative forum or on behalf of the Northern elders forum to which I belong, but after checking whether Birma was mandated to go and speak on behalf of ACF on this particular occasion, the answer is no. And from what I know of the Northern elders forum to which I belong, I have not been in any meeting with Malam Dauda Birma for a long time, I don’t remember seeing him attending any of our meetings or activities. So I want to make it absolutely very clear that Malam Dauda was speaking on behalf of some elders outside the ACF and outside the Northern Elders forum and I believe outside many other groups that I know are working together with us. So he is entirely on his own and we respect his voice as a Nigerian citizen to associate and to give support where he feels his support is needed or desired. He also said that 99.9 percent or 100 percent of northerners have the same political opinion on the matter, while we concede his right to speak for himself and for people with whom he associates with but certainly he cannot be speaking for the ACF , and for the Northern Elders Forum. I tried to investigate from other groups that I know on ground and nobody is aware that he in one way or the other sought their permission to speak on behalf of some elders in the North because there are elders in most of these groups and he himself is an elder, no doubt about it, but if he had spoken for Malam Dauda Birma as a person nobody is going to say anything but if he is speaking on behalf others who have not mandated him to do so.
But is Dauda Birma a member of the Northern Elders Forum?
No, he is not, as far as I know he is not a member of the Northern Elders Forum.
Why are you so concerned about his statements?
Why should somebody who does not belong to your organization speak on your behalf?
Has he caused any damage by doing so?
In the last two, three days, people have been calling me to find out whether that statement came from the ACF and this is why I am trying to clarity the point that he must have spoken for himself, certainly not on behalf of the Northern Elders Forum. There is no way he could have been speaking on our behalf because he didn’t get any mandate from any official of the ACF to make this kind of statement.
Many people from the North are thinking that the leadership of the country should come back to the North, what is the position of the Northern Elders Forum on this?
We have already made our position very clear, just like the people of the South-South want to keep the presidency in their zone, so it is our wish and desire and our demand that the presidency should also come back to the north in 2015 and we have every justification to ask for its return to our area.
What are you doing now to ensure the North comes out with on candidate in 2015?
You know that the ACF is not a political party, the Northern elders forum is not a political party and many other groups that are working in the interest of the North are themselves not political parties, nevertheless we know you cannot contest an election except you are a registered political party. So the candidate that should emerge to contest election must be a candidate of a particular registered political party but what we intend to do is to make sure that we persuade the parties to present candidates of Northern extraction
Four northern governors were recently stoned in Port Harcourt, what is the position of the elders forum on Rivers State?
Well, you have already answered part of the question by thinking that responsible elders in Rivers State will not do the kind of things we were told were done at the airport against the governors that were visiting the state. It might well be that some elders were behind it but we understand that youth organized to come and harass the four visiting northern governors, we take it that it is a youthful matter and our youth have already answered back so this should not be allowed to happen again. If I was sure some elders are behind this episode then I will in my position as an elder have reacted appropriately but we leave it that it is still the political things.
They have attempted to disgrace our governors by throwing them with water bottles and so on, but our youths have reacted by saying that it should not happen again because they may want to retaliate and that might not be pleasant so I hope the message has been taken by the youths that perhaps have done this in their area.
How will you assess the level of security in the north since the declaration of a state of emergency in the three northern states?
There are so many sides to the issue of security in the country with particular emphasis on the North East. We played a role in persuading Mr. President to take the line of both carrot and stick this is why we visited the President. The first time we went to him to submit our document this is one of the recommendations we made, that the tactics of sheer force by itself alone will not resolve this crisis, so we must also approach the use in terms of trying to find peaceful resolution, thank God he accepted it and the following day, this policy was announced that he is going to set up a committee on dialogue and reconciliation because this is what we put specifically in our recommendation, he accepted it and set up the committee which started work immediately. But we look at the declaration of the state of emergency more or less as a political decision to please a political pressure group that has always been against a peace and reconciliation approach, they believe force will bring an end to the crisis and, well I think they succeeded by getting the president to declare this state of emergency and pumping in more and more troops all over the North-East, I mean Adamawa, Borno and Yobe but what is even more worrying soon after that because if you want people from Boko Haram to come forward to discussion and you are pumping in troops to more or less drive them into hiding within the country or even outside the country, that appear to us a negation of the peace approach. I think those who insist on force had the final say by ensuring that the President proscribes Boko Haram. Proscription means something you cannot even deal with, when you proscribe something it is saying that there is no body that government should be talking to because they don’t recognize it, if they don’t recognize that it is there so there is nothing to talk to, so by these two actions particularly the latter, we are seeing that it is undermining the work of the peace and reconciliation committee.
What is the way out?
It is for those calling for force to see whether force at the end of the day is the answer to this intractable problem. Those who have succeeded in persuading government to take these two steps, will soon make it set up a committee to pursue dialogue and reconciliation which will lead to peaceful resolution of the crisis. We read in the papers everyday that the Nigeria government or even the American government has been accused of not really treating Boko Haram as it should, like a terrorist organization and so on. We saw this from the statement made only two or three days ago by the president of CAN that the American government should declare Boko Haram a terrorist organization and so on. This to me is Nigerian politics being internationalized and people thought perhaps this is the way out. Well they have failed to see the lesson from the Americans that with all their military power they have failed in so many wars, they have failed in the Vietnam war, they have failed in the Korean war, Iraqi war, they are now failing in the Afganistan war and they themselves set up office for the Taliban to come for dialogue in Qatar but the Taliban have refused to show up. I think that should be enough lesson for small countries like ours who can’t bear even small internal security matters to say that this kind of crises has to be through the barrel of the gun rather than through the jaws.
So you see the way out is eventually to go back then do the correct things in the correct way. Part of the thing you have asked of makes me to considers the so called civilian JTF, already if we are not careful this is going to lead to small civil war, it has started, the Boko Haram have now also started to engage the so called civilian JTF which means that the people themselves are being set against each other to fight. If themilitary JTF has failed how would this succeed? So you see it’s another political gimmick that if we are not careful will draw us back into more serious problem than we have been up to at this particular point in time.
